Tattered Edges
by GeoFount
Summary: [Mikasa x Bertholdt] Falling apart starts at the edges.


**SPOILERS FOR MANGA. So beware.**

**I tried to think of the crackiest pairing I could and then write it. And that's how this demon spawn was born.**

* * *

Sometimes he wonders if they are the same person.

Every night she will sit with her back to him. Her drawn back, with the fire casting shadows along her curved shoulders and dark hair the same color as his, and her knees drawn up to her chest. She will sit gazing out into the darkness of the night. There is no need to watch but still she does. Every night the same.

Every night he tends to the fire and prepares any food they might have scrounged up that day. When the food is ready, he will hold it to her without a word.

And every night, ever the same, she will take it from him without a word. Mikasa only speaks when it is absolutely necessary. Bertholdt is the same. The exact same.

* * *

She never cries nor does she yell. Most of the time she is silent and when she does speak, her words are low and quiet. Sometimes he likens her to an abandoned house. He knows because he is the same. The exact same. An empty barren shell whose occupants had left one by one, leaving behind a darkened husk that still stands, waiting invitingly for its occupants to come back home.

But now there is no one to come back home.

* * *

"There was a book Armin had once we were kids." Mikasa, like Bertholdt, only talks when she has something important to say, so when she tells him this he knows it's important. "It was a book about the outside world. We used to read it all the time. Eren and Armin especially. They used to spend hours going through it. I would read it sometimes but most of the time I preferred watching them read it. It was when they were the happiest, reading that book. To them it symbolized the best things this world has to offer, all the beautiful things that exist in it. I think to them…to them that book symbolized the future and…and hope."

She pulls her scarf around her face, just under her eyes. It muffles her words, but still he hears her. "They looked forward to seeing the ocean most of all."

She doesn't cry and he doesn't say he's sorry but they both harbor the respective feelings.

* * *

Why she told him about that he never knew, but later he begins to wonder what became of that book. Perhaps it had been burned in the fires that followed or maybe it had been destroyed by fleeing feet.

But somehow Bertholdt can't help but imagine that didn't happen. Instead he imagines it sitting amid the ruins of the last city of humankind, perhaps buried under rubble or bodies. He imagines it sitting there, vulnerable to the elements with no one left to take care of it. In his imagination he sees it decaying, slowly at first. The pages will dry out, becoming yellow and brittle. The pretty pictures of the ocean and the fields will fade under the harsh glare of the sun and after a while the pages will start to tatter and tear. Right at the edges, at first, and then further and further in, until they rip completely, destroyed pages of past hopes for the future.

Bertholdt tries to put it out of his mind. For some unexplainable reason he doesn't like thinking about that book and all its tattered edges.

* * *

When he had dug up the first stash of gas cans, she had asked him, "You prepared for this, didn't you?"

He had wondered what exactly she had meant he had prepared for. The fleeing, the destruction, the deaths, the botched rescue attempt, the betrayal? All of them, none of them?

In the end he decided it didn't really matter which it was and left her question unanswered.

* * *

Annie had been the first to die. Bertholdt should have known _he _would go after her. He had seen _him _descend the wall but at the time Bertholdt hadn't known. Not about Annie. After Armin told him, he convinced himself that Armin was a liar and Armin was, but not about Annie being captured.

Fallen warriors are no use to anyone. The ape titan smashed her crystal like it was a fine wine glass rather than the legendary steel which no blade had been able to cut. The shards sprayed out 100 meters in every different direction, a sparkling shower of red that was horribly beautiful. Red like rubies. Like blood.

* * *

He carries the supplies and she follows. They hide in the trees when danger draws near, silent and still. They don't have any blades. He hadn't brought any and hers were blunt by the time he snagged her. They have no way to defend themselves so they hide instead, sometimes for days at a time, as their supplies dwindle and they starve. Water they can carry with them but food is another matter.

Food is plentiful, when they are able to get to the forest floor to retrieve it. She designs a slingslot and with they kill squirrels and chipmunks. There is much to be had in the world. Without men to ravage it, it has blossomed and bloomed. There are birds, flocks so thick they blot out the sky, and the night is alive with the cry of insects. In the trees they hide in, sometimes an animal, usually a deer or some other type of hoofed creature, will wander by. The animals aren't afraid of titans because titans don't eat them. And they aren't afraid of man because man has been absent from the world for a hundred years.

Mikasa designs a bow and arrows and one day shoots one of the deer. They spend two days following its wounded blood trail to where it has finally fallen. They don't get to eat it as it has fallen at the feet of a titan and they don't get a chance to shoot anymore deer either. The deer run from their scent after that.

* * *

She never tries to attack him. He thinks it's because she doesn't have a good weapon to use on him, and even she did, he still has the titan blood. She would either have to be very lucky and kill him in one blow or hope to finish him off before he healed. Either way she never attacks him. Bertholdt can think of a million and one reasons why she should but then he realizes she would only need one, and that one is dead.

"Break their hope like you break their spine," the ape titan had said and he had done both to Eren. As a titan Eren was impressive but inexperienced, and as a human he was fragile as a twig. He wasn't the protector, he was the _protected, _but when all the protectors (like Levi, and Erwin, and Hanji, and Hannes, and-and everyone) were dead or incapacitated, he became the victim.

Mikasa and Bertholdt are a lot alike. They only had enough room in their hearts to care about a few people and even less to hate.

Bertholdt hadn't killed Eren. And maybe that was why she sat with her back to him.

* * *

There are times when he thinks maybe they aren't so alike. In her group, she had been the protector. She had been the one who defended, the one who would put herself in harm's way to protect her two best comrades. In their group Armin had been the thinker and the planner. Eren had been the determination, the emotion, the red string of fate that bound them all together.

For Bertholdt it was different. He had been the stable one, the pillar. Annie had been the edge, the one who was halfway out and halfway in, the loner but still reluctant to take that final step outwards. He had loved her for that.

Reiner was closest to what Mikasa had been in her group. Reiner had been the protector, the bodyguard, the big guy, the jock, the big brother. Bertholdt misses him most of all.

What are we now, he wonders as they make their way through the forest day by steady day, never seeing anyone, never hearing anyone. Then he thinks it didn't matter what they are now. Cause all they had to show it to was to each other.

* * *

Sometimes he thinks they are _very_ different.

"I would have killed all of them," she says when they are sitting in a tree waiting for the titans to leave. Her hands clench. "I still would if I could."

Bertholdt doesn't want to kill anyone, not even the titans. He never did. Yet it had been his foot that had brought down the wall. It was his fault that humanity, _all _of humanity was dead. Funny how out of the two of them it was he, the one who hated confrontation, who was the murderer and she, so willing to kill and sacrifice, was not.

Yet Mikasa never mentions this. Even when he had kidnapped Eren she had never called him a murderer while all the rest of their companions had. Maybe that was because he hadn't killed Eren or Armin of any of the few people she had loved.

Mikasa and Bertholdt are a lot alike but not in this aspect. Bertholdt _knows _he's a murderer, even if he wasn't the one to kill Eren.

* * *

The first thing she asked him when she woke was, "Why?"

At first he had thought she meant the destruction of the city. He wanted to tell her he didn't mean it, that they had only come to save Annie, that they had not known what the ape titan was planning. "Break down the center," the ape titan had said, "and the whole thing collapses." The ape titan hadn't known that the underground tunnels ran all along the underside of the city but he had _learned._ That was the scariest part of all.

Mikasa had closed her eyes but no tears came. Bertholdt knew because he had done the same. The exact same.

"Why?" she demanded again. "Why did you _save me_?"

He never answered her and she never asked him again.

* * *

Bertholdt always leads and Mikasa always follows. She never asks him where they're going and he never tells her. He supposes she thinks they are searching for other survivors, for perhaps some lost pocket of humanity in some far corner of the world that escaped the clutches of the titans somehow.

Bertholdt doesn't hope for that, though he never tells her it. When they finally do reach the place he has been searching for, he stops.

The wind is strong and salty, and above them the gulls wheel, crying out in harsh languages. Water moves, in and out, curls of dark green and blue, a sound that is both frightening and soothing. Before him is a vastness the likes of which he has never seen before. The edge of the world. The end of all things.

Bertholdt does not see Mikas's face as she moves forward. Slowly, like a robot, like a child that is just starting to find its feet, she moves until the water is splashing on her boots. She stands there, the wind in her beautiful hair the same color as his, and the water soaking her clothes.

The ocean.

He wonders if it looks the same as that picture in that book she had talked about, that book that lay decaying in the destruction of their old home and their old decaying friends. That book that, by now, would have tattered fraying edges, bordering on the destruction of itself.

"Why?" The word is harsh. Bitten out. Against her thighs Mikasa's fists shake. When she turns to face him, her face is scrunched, the tears starting to form at the corner of her eyes. "Why did you bring me here?" she demands. "Why _here _of all places? Why?"

When she moves towards him, he takes a step back, only once, and she knocks him to the sand. Her hands are around his throat, circling his flesh, applying pressure. It occurs to him for a brief moment she has had a weapon all along but she has never used it. She is yelling but he can't understand her. The water splashes against his face as she straddles him in the surf. The salt water stings his flesh.

Here, he thinks. Here maybe she would finally kill him like she should have done so long ago, back when Reiner and he had first kidnapped Eren. Here at the tattered edge of all things with Mikasa on top of him and the water of the ocean in his ears. Here at the end of the world.

But she doesn't. Her hands loosen and she is shaking so badly he can feel every part of her that touches him. Then her hands are on his shoulders, clutching him there instead of around his neck. Her face morphs into something painful and hollow, a deep aching pain that she has never given voice to. Bertholdt understands. Because he's the same. The exact same.

Her hair trails wetly against his cheek and into his water logged ears her breath gasps. Her whole body quivers. She sobs. A deep hollow sound, an empty home that echoes with the realization no one is ever coming back home to it.

Against his flesh, her tears sting worse than the salt water.

* * *

Later, as they sit on the grass at the edge of the world, she asks him, "Why did you save me?"

And this time he answers. "I didn't save you. I just saved _somebody_, the closest person to me. I just wanted to save someone. I didn't care who it was." His hands clench. "I just wanted to save someone."

He feels sick to his stomach saying this. Saving one person was not enough to atone for anything he had done. He's too far gone to be saved by anything. He had been a useless titan, never being able to complete the mission he had been given, and a despicable human being. Maybe that was the problem with titan shifters. They were not fully titan nor fully human, so in the end they had no choice but to be perpetually terrible at being either.

But Mikasa is laughing. It is a throaty laugh, one that could never have been considered a laugh of joy, and across her face red spreads. Tears fall, a soft line that dots into the scarf as she pulls it up to her nose. That red string of fate that bound her to Eren. It is soaking wet with water from the sea and her tears.

"I'm glad," she says.

* * *

Falling apart starts at the edges.


End file.
